Friday, December 15, 2017
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The FCC, a U.S. regulator affecting the Internet, has 3 Republican members and 2 female Democratic ones.

Yesterday, as expected, it voted along the party lines and abolished the 2015 Obama-era "net neutrality" that demands all the Internet Service Providers to believe and incorporate the ludicrous assumption that "all bits are created equal" – that forces the ISPs to become mutually indistinguishable dull pipelines that just transmit bits, regardless of how they're clumped and what content they represent. During the FCC chairman's speech, someone (probably a supporter of net neutrality) reported a bomb threat so they needed to evacuate the room and confirm that the report was just fearmongering, just like every single argument in favor of net neutrality.

When I searched for comments about "net neutrality" on Twitter and Google News, among others, I was amazed by the amount of hysteria that requires the hysterical people's absolute and hopeless stupidity. I was happy to see that e.g. Ted Cruz's reaction was the same.

I picked the "Brawndo presidential panel" from the 2006 Idiocracy movie. In the dystopian future society, the people's average IQ is some 50 and they have accumulated the geniuses – whose IQ may be around 70 in average. The average guy from our times – IQ around 100 – accidentally got to the future and was arrested.

They noticed he was extremely smart and he could be pardoned if he solves some problems of that society. One of them was that nothing grows in the fields. It turns out they water the fields with Brawndo, a drink with electrolytes – whose marketing was politically guaranteed by the corporation that produced it (you may imagine the Brawndo company to represent Tesla or another company that is capable of sucking billions from the government as well as promote itself to a savior of the world in the official dumb propaganda). Plants don't grow and the IQ 100 "genius" from our epoch recommends them water which they imagine to be just some junk from the toilets. The video segment above demonstrates that all the sensible guys' efforts to encourage them to think at least a little bit are totally futile.

All the people including the "26th century geniuses" were just trained to parrot "Brawndo is great because it has electrolytes" and "it's what the plants crave for", among various permutations of such slogans. They have no idea what water or electrolytes actually are or what are any actually relevant valid sentences that link these words. Even though Idiocracy takes place in the 26th century, I am afraid that as of 2017, we have basically gotten very close to the state of affairs as described in Idiocracy.

There is just a giant number of people – ordinary people as well as those with numerous political positions (that surely includes the Democratic FCC members and Bernie Sanders) – who just keep on repeating similar absurd or extremely oversimplified slogans such as "global warming is real" or, in this case, "abolition of net neutrality means the end of the Internet", "we will pay $1,000 a month for every website now", "I won't be able to contact my friends and relatives now", and so on.

Is it so hard just to think and realize that the Internet existed before 2015 when the net neutrality regulation was introduced? It even existed before Obama's tenure. The Internet has existed for decades. It has always worked basically the same. You could connect to basically everything. Some websites were fast, some websites were sometimes slow because some capacity limits were reached. The ISPs obviously want their clients to be mostly satisfied for the same amount of money so they won't impose their own limits and slowdowns without good reasons that help other consumers much more than it hurts some of them etc. The ISPs have never filtered the content politically – their service is at a much more physical level. To filter comments because of some political or higher human motivations would mean to make a big portion of the consumers dissatisfied and to lose too many of them.

Why can't almost all the people figure out that the alarmism after the abolition of net neutrality is self-evidently bogus? How incredibly stupid the people have to be? Whether regulations saying that "all bits must be treated as equal" are ultimately beneficial for the bulk of the Internet users may be a difficult question and everyone who studies these things should be able to appreciate that it's hard to decide and most people just can't do it too sensibly because they misunderstand too many things. But to see that the difference between the two policies cannot be similar to the difference between "the world" and "the end of the world" is something that every human person and every dog above IQ of 50 just should be capable of deducing.

Like in Idiocracy, we are increasingly drowning in repetitive screams of slogans driven by increasingly stupid, increasingly loud, and increasingly self-confident cliques of absolute morons. Net neutrality is harmful but it's just one technicality – one small piece of the modern industries that net neutrality reduced to the basically "socialist or communist regime of stagnation". But I am more worried about the overall package of similar hysterias – the hysteria after the abolition of net neutrality is just another example of our convergence towards the real dumb society as pictured in Idiocracy.